


to the End, then

by lackingsoy



Category: Code Geass
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dead People, Emperor Lelouch, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Love/Hate, M/M, POV Alternating, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Zero Requiem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 16:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18663931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: Pre-R2.23: In which time moves forward, and for once he does not move with it.Or: Lelouch visits the Britannian Imperial Cemetery before razing it to the ground.





	to the End, then

**Author's Note:**

> For the purposes of this story, Euphemia was not stripped of her royal status and was given a proper burial.

He dismissed his royal guard, after a speech that rolled from his tongue like irresistible wine. His newly acquired slaves laved at it, reveled in its taste. His name, the one he had discarded and reclaimed, ripped from their lips in false fervor, and Lelouch was numb to his crown. The throne was a relic, a rigid thing of past regimes, and it made him emperor.

To his side: Suzaku, primed in black and red and broken fallacies, and C.C., used to seeing him play (only the game ended some time ago, and victory lost him more than it gave).

Suzaku watched on in resolute stillness even as Lelouch stood, walked away. In his peripheral, C.C. moved to follow, only to be halted by a low murmur, a black-clad figure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lelouch didn't look back.

He did acquire a sword, though. When the cool hilt molded to his palm with graceful ease, and the blade rested a sharp cut away from him, he smiled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The paths didn't change, but he supposed he did. Lelouch remembered, distinctly, the one that led to the Imperial Villa, the memory of his younger self traced by the pleasant, brittle beauty of privilege. He remembered Nunnally, her petite frame and her joyful motion. Her restless, restless feet; it had driven their mother up a wall and Euphemia into a series of barely contained giggles. Nunnally had sight, then, and the sky seemed to exist in her eyes. Even now, Lelouch could imagine her pulsing pale pools of blue, tinted purple at dusk. Then she closed her eyes, and he closed his heart, and it’s been eight years since. This path did not ache nor crave for fallen bodies, only for things he no longer had. (His mother. His sisters. His brothers. His self.)

His imperial robes chafed against him, which shouldn’t be possible. His clothing was made from the finest silk, the most enviable thread, lined and leaden with gold. Lelouch reached up and gingerly removed the ceremonial headpiece. He considered it for a moment; grazed a finger across its blistering red eye, then dashed it to the ground. He left it there on that forlorn avenue, and continued down a separate path.

A separate path: the fitting one with its procession of dead bodies, of graves filled and yet to be filled.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He had met rotten and rotting bodies, with their limp flesh and festering orifices, with a shaking austerity that was constructed from young bravado alone. Older now, he made himself into a demon, a well-worn facet that he could now pull across his eyes, his lips and face like some christened veil. A smile, split with teeth. Sharp and only slightly vicious, the smallest distinction between beatific and neurotic. Lelouch didn’t shake anymore.

Royal deaths were buried well. In eulogies and an endless succession of memorial days, in fine wood and velvet-cushioned caskets. But royal bodies were still bodies, and Lelouch smelled the grave dirt, tasted the slightly drained air and the unearthly quality beneath the sickeningly sweet scents of flora. (Death was still death, no matter how sweet the flowers, how soft the grave, how contrite the reaper.)

He found her grave where he expected, or where others would not. It was hidden, almost, obscured as some notion of precaution amidst a grove of arching sage, the only patch like it in the garden. A simple tombstone sat within the loose thicket, side by side recently sown roses, the buds small and new. Lelouch was careful not the disturb them, these solitary markers, and knelt a short distance away from the cut of stone. He sank his sword into the dirt there and stared at the tombstone for a time, eyes fixed but unseeing. Then he gathered himself and looked.

 _Euphemia li Britannia,_ it read simply. _Beloved Sister. Queen of Hearts._

Queen of hearts: a two-sided composition. Schneizel, thought Lelouch, a prickle of something edging on mirth, or hysteria, affecting in his mind. There was an urge in him to laugh, to rap against this brittle glass (and force apart that horrible simplicity). He had long been stripped of that labored creature in his chest.

Lelouch bowed his head and smiled, a thin whiplash across his face, his heart.

“Sister,” he said, tender with all his jagged edges. “Here we both lie.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suzaku loosely understood that anyone operating within palace walls was under Lelouch's geass. A dangerous assumption, perhaps, one that could cost them the impeccable execution of Zero Requiem, but he saw the listless quality of Lelouch's dark-rimmed eyes and stopped C.C. from following.

“Leave him,” he said, voice tighter than he liked. Her eyes seemed to glint brighter as her gaze shifted slowly from her caught arm to his closed face.

“Why,” she said. He briefly wondered what he was stopping her from. (For Lelouch’s sake, or for his.) “Do you intend to follow him, instead?” C.C. leveled her gaze with his and raised an eyebrow, prying as always. His jaw worked only slightly, and he spoke before his throat closed:

“Yes.” _For a new world. For an ending that mimicked a beginning._

Then Suzaku saw Lelouch, hand loose and easy around a sword’s hilt, and the world to come became an immediate afterthought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The blade was nothing out of the ordinary.

Stainless steel, a decorative piece with its smooth golden handle carved from luxurious strokes. The first impression of Britannian pride and its cheap lust for glory. Nothing exceptionally notable. Except, perhaps, for its capacity to lull death into a human's orbit, but (even that was no unique thing) he was no human, was he. This was made abundantly clear by the grave marked for his dead (murdered) sister and his other one (martyred), the missing grave by his side. And Suzaku, grinding his head into the gravel, vehement and furious and perfectly sane. _Shirley and Euphy. Were they nothing to you. Pawns on a board, plastic figurines, played and employed._

His name was a curse, gnawed between clenched teeth. Spat, a smear of blood across all that was once good and right.

 _Bring her back,_ and these were not tears, bleeding from the holes in their chests.

(Lelouch vi Britannia was no human---

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The heart was a blind, tone-deaf creature, slow and stupid and young.

Young: "You have one, you know. Even if you don't care to know it." She said this just as the sun fell under, when it pulled down the light and the world seemed like it was ending in some fitful blaze.

A mild scoff left him, as if offended or rightly amused. "I do know it. It's you. And Nunnally. And Suzaku. Others, too, just a few." He did not need the sun to see her small and brilliant smile. It burned him nonetheless.

His heart: held haplessly by others, flayed and flayed just for being.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\---he could not afford to be.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the first pellets of rain found his face, Suzaku was already disturbed. The Emperor's--Lelouch's--headpiece was a wrinkled and dirty thing on the ground, as if cast aside; abandoned. The red gem in its middle glittered even below the awning of the oncoming storm.

He didn't like this. The rain, the empty space, the dulled edge he had seen so clearly in Lelouch's eyes. Pregnant with desolation, an inert thing so far removed from the usual flare of cool vindication, that Suzaku did not dare to touch it (because if he did, his resolve would thin and be forgiving instead of unyielding.)

A snap at his collarbone and his cape with all its flamboyant blackness fell back at his feet, close to the white piece of shed royalty. A weight great and unsure lifted from his shoulders, broke his trance. He began to run.

Urgency ~~fear~~ curled in him, felted his insides like hot tar. It was a feeling not unlike the one he experienced when he watched Euphy crumple an age ago, a kind of gravity that had him plummeting into the earth, imagined him a body without ground. A kind that ran him mad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(His heart was sick, and Suzaku blamed Lelouch as much as he blamed himself. Yet, they were still together in this pit, sick and sickening.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"He still speaks of you with unequivocal devotion."

Lelouch smiled, the notion as easy as it was tiresome. The tombstone was a sheen of rain, little streams of water dodging across the engravings. A single tear lodged itself in her name. He closed his eyes.

“He loved you like no other.” Lelouch imagined the shimmer of life in Suzaku’s eyes at the mere mention of her name. The tired lines in his face that faded just a little bit, made him more his age--young and stupid and forgetful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forget: the pull of his finger, the blood on her that wasn’t hers but suddenly irrevocably was. (In another time, in a different place, they both have guns, they both pull the trigger, and they both want to bleed but don’t.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I took from him the one good thing that existed in this godforsaken place.” Lelouch said, soft, and his hand closed around the blade, tight and tightening. “So, he took that from me, too.” A small bark of laughter, cold and lost to the hail from above. “How fair." Lelouch looked at where the blade met the dirt, just shy of his right thigh. Thin rivulets of red and rain waned and seeped black into the dirt. He relaxed his grip, watched on as the rivulet became a slightly more opaque stream of diluted heat and congealed liquid. There was nothing to be gained from doing this. Undoing, becoming undone. _The dead are dead._

"Your death was never meant to be like this." He said.

  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And if the rain scoured him of his anger, seared him with its cooled touch, then what of his ~~tears~~  blood? It still ran hot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This is it, Euphemia. Let this be enough.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This could not be simply misery, thought Suzaku, when he finally caught sight of Lelouch.

(Lelouch: a pale soaked body folded at the knees, steeped in red and rain. A white hand gripped the sword, not on the hilt. White skin split across the blade, fine and frayed, bleeding out. Lelouch would not let go. Suzaku saw the tombstone, what name it beared. They were both kneeling by then, cold bodies side by side. Rain peeled across their faces, stung blindly at skin. Salt caught in his eyes.)

People should not be this cold, thought Suzaku, when he finally pried Lelouch’s deathly fingers from its vice grip (his fingers kept slipping, numb and slick). Thunder struck through the sky. (Suzaku saw their hands, laminated with an elastic film of blood.) Lelouch still did not look at him.

“Stop,” Suzaku said, quietly. “Stop trying to die before your time.”

Another blade of light above them; the world beneath them trembled with it. Lelouch looked up, eyes a lost haze of purple. When he spoke, it was with a smile: “You or me, Suzaku Kururugi?”

The rain and its humid breath clung to him, a different weight. His hands grew colder still. “I don't know.” He said.    

 

 


End file.
